PSFK Good Ideas Salon London Speaker Ruby Pseudo

Jenny Owen, better known as Ruby Pseudo, will be speaking on our Good Ideas and Youth panel at the PSFK Good Ideas Salon London. Along with Paul Graham of Anomaly UK, Terry Guy of Monorex / Secret Wars, and moderator Piers Fawkes of PSFK, the panel will discuss trends in British youth culture and how companies and organizations can create authentic, respectful relationships with young people.

First, who are you and what do you do?

I write as Ruby Pseudo for my company of the same name; a youth consultancy that runs off the fuel of a global youth network we’ve been gleaning and gathering over the last year. We’re lucky enough to work with brands like Nike, Unilever and Microsoft, helping them with insights and strategy for campaigns and marketing. I also work at Wieden and Kennedy as their youth planner, which is smashing. As the head of UK Marketing at Nike explains us: ‘What Ruby and her network offer is an unfiltered, honest and real view of how kids are interacting with your brand—real time. If you are of a weak disposition, don’t like the truth or can’t cope without one-way mirror focus groups then stay away from Ruby. If you want it told like it is, with some very real and usable strategy recommendations, then you have found the right person…’

You’ll be sharing your ideas on our Good Ideas and Youth panel. In one paragraph, can you explain what themes and ideas you hope to touch upon during the discussion?

I tend to talk around The Teen Commandments, a book I’m writing this year with a clever man who hasn’t come up with a darn pseudonym yet. We talk about the digital Teen Commandments, the print campaign Teem Commandments, anything – but they are, hopefully, an authentic way to look at talking with the youth market, based on global insight and strategy. A set of sort of Ruby rules and regulations almost… We also feel strongly about the folk devil mentality the British society tends to have around UK kids, and how this will end up affecting the adults of tomorrow. If we don’t empower them today, using global brand power to make a difference, we have a very big problem tomorrow. It’s ridiculous that we exist in world fuelled by moral panic around ‘the kids of today’, they’re children. Christ.

Five links to sites that provide you with inspiration:

Three Billion
Pony Step
I Spy Cool
We Make Money Not Art
Style Sniper

Thanks Jenny/Ruby!

To hear more from Jenny and others, you can purchase your ticket to our Good Ideas Salon London on Jan 30th here.